What it looks like to be you

When designing online, one must get a sense of what things look like for other people. Gone are the days with the little button that said, “This site looks best with BrowserYou’llNeverUse.” The best one of those, btw, said, “This site looks best on my computer.” Because it always does.

CSS was supposed to take care of a lot of those issues. Of course it did not, because not everyone plays by the same rules (see browser compatibility).

But still, we try. Because we care, we love, we try. A recent project has presented issues with Safari on Mac (where it’s perfect with Firefox on Windows, so what gives?) So we have been interested in checking out a good Mac emulator. But, failing that, we will be happy to take our chances with buying time on BrowserCam. We have seen other sites that let you publically check out what a site looks like through a different browser, but for project development, that’s not really a “good option”.

We, however, remain steadfast in our love of Firefox. We hear 1.5 is set to drop today, too. W00t.

Here is an extension for viewing a site “as IE” while never leaving the comfort of your Firefox tab (from lifehacker).

And speaking of Firefox tabs, you might want to move your tab bar. We have yet to try tohis trick, but it sounds like fun.

And there is this promising article on How to Turn FF into a Web Writer. We are writers for the web, so this looks nice. And here’s a fun movie from the amazing folks at Coudal partners about a writer.

We found safaritest to be a good and cheap (free) previewing solution for the Windows-based web designer. The KHTML engine is a bit differen than Firefox’s, so one needs to actually see the screen to test the differences. Although, for its quirkiness, it’s necessary to have a Mac with IE on it to test that browser.